Gypsies Christians met for a week of celebration at the turn of May 24 in the town of Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer, a small pearl Camargue, as every year. Always nomads scattered among the nations of Western Europe come together here to worship their patron saint, a "holy gypsy", and its image, black, kept in the crypt of the cathedral in this sunny coastal village, and wet in the turquoise waters of the Mediterranean. Over time, the colorful and noisy caravans of wagons pulled by horses or men have become caravans, luxury cars sometimes, sometimes (more often) cans shaky, but the spirit remained the same, to celebrate, to sing, to rhythm of flamenco, dating and for once, just once in a years, defeat and dispersal distances, and gather together as a people, not just an uncomfortable minority, but as a true "nation." Write
this colorful celebration is just a small attempt to arouse interest in a people living among us but that we ignore almost completely if not the existence, surely the habits, identity. Wherever they live, in fact, the nomads are always surrounded by an aura of mistrust and misunderstanding (usually feeling returned, but it is not a valid reason to "turn a blind eye" to understand and decide).
To begin with, are the "sedentary" starting with a negative opinion, a priori.
Just open a dictionary to realize this: the simple words "nomadic" or "vagabond", immediately assume a negative connotation in our language, even contemptuous. And historically nomadic peoples represented cruelty, theft and looting, something to fear, the hordes of "barbarians" from foreign lands willing to put fire to the cities of Europe.
In fact, rather than the memory of past raids is the fear of such a different world view, the fear that what we seem to possess the right is actually a fragile agreement, though most of the nomadic peoples with which we had to do was devoted mainly in peaceful activities and harmless.
Today everyone knows that, but the nomads were primarily artisans, farmers and horse dealers, and favorite activities necessitated by their constant go (a passion that has now been transformed into love for cars), and famous musicians . The proverbial
cialtroneria served the Gypsies to settle in Christian: false stories depicting them as persecuted Christians of Egypt by the Muslims, many false bubble of imperial and papal which required local authorities to accept them.
Anyway, it is always a series of misunderstandings that created much of the traditional European hostility towards them were in fact exchanged or similar to the Saracens. It is with the modern age, however, starting with the most severe persecution, which culminated in World War II. But over persecution, is the attempt to assimilate by the sedentary population to threaten the identity of a nomad. And principles, ways of looking at life, radically different. In our view, are deplorable, as well as the tendency to commit theft (and attribute, generalizing to an entire people), inability to work, to "set up house," the apparent dirt, did not send their children to (our) school ...
On the other hand we are, from their point of view, to make usually seen as immoral actions. Wage employment, for example, is experienced by nomads who are or have been forced to do so, as a theft of time, something that upsets the natural rhythm that they have and they feel entitled to have. In many countries attempted to integrate them in this way, as in those former communist Europe, the result was failure: the highest level of absenteeism from work, and low productivity.
As for theft, one must consider that they have a much more bland concept of private property (the property is usually divided up between all members of the clan), and if this does not justify anything, from their point of view, even our properties, such as of the earth, and the misuse in order to gain profit, to squeeze the bone could be seen as an injustice.
There is also an opposite tendency, to idealize the "people of the wind, giving it a romantic character, libertarian (to which the bohemians), resulting in a series of stereotypes and simplifications. First of all, though it may seem surprising, the same nomadism. Today, many gypsies are indeed sedentary, and many are traditional, and live in shacks and in normal houses. In Eastern Europe there are many "gypsy neighborhoods." It is also the widespread belief that there is a "Gypsy People", while this term, like other similar products (gypsy, gypsy, Stroller ...) have been assigned by the "Gage, the non-Gypsies, in groups so different that it can not certainly be defined as one people. Change traditions, languages, from group to group, keeping track of the languages \u200b\u200bof the countries that went through, as well as religions, which, under a film of Christianity or Islam, are traces of ancient myths and cults.
remains the problem of a misfit people who are pushing to make the time to Westerners without such integration, the first step towards a solution is, first of all, know.
-Marco-Ranocchiari